Bruno Nettl (2)

Chapter 1

What is Ethnomusicology?

Defining ethnomusiccology is not an easy task, for there is a difference between what those who call themselves ethnomusicologists have done and are doing, and what they think they should be doing. For practical purposes, it is simplest to say that ethnomusicologists in the past have been students of the music outside Western civilization and, to a smaller extent, of European folk music. As such they have worked in an area adjacent to musicology at large and also to cultural anthropology. Musicology, defining itself as the field which involves the scholarly and objective study of music of all types and from all approaches, has actually given the lion's share of its attention to the music of Western urban, civilization, the music of the European written tradition. And while conventional musicologists have occasionally considered also the music of other cultures, they have more frequently withdrawn from this large area and relegated it to the ethnomusicologist, whom they have sometimes considered as just another kind of musicological specialist, but at other times a representative of a related but separate field from theirs. Anthropologists, especially those who concentrate on the study of culture, have claimed all of the world's cultures as their just domain; but in fact they have spent by far most of their time and the space in their publications on the cultures outside Western civilization. Thus ethnomusicologists, whatever their definition of themselves happens to be (and some of these definitions are discussed below), have worked, on the one hand, as the special kind of musicologist who investigates exotic music and, on the other hand, as the special kind of anthropologist who investigates music rather than other aspects of human culture, again outside Western civilization.

Ethnomusicologists have contributed to these parent disciplines, and their work has been based largely on the methods developed in musicology and cultural anthropology. In spite of the relatively late recognition of the importance of ethnomusicological data by music historians, the role which ethnomusicology has played in musicology at large is considerable.

Needless to say, the primary contribution involves the musicologist's desire to understand all music, i.e., all human music and even (if there is such a thing) musical phenomena in the animal world parenthetically, it is perhaps significant to find that the latter, although no way apart of anthropology (which is by definition the study of man) has tacitly been included in the ethnomusicologist's sphere of interest, as if, perhaps, exotic cultures and non-human behavior shared common elements. The only really common element here is, of course, the strangeness in relation to Western civilization. As early as the late nineteenth century, musicologists recognized the need for having data on the music of other cultures available if they were to understand music as a universal phenomenon. Psychologists of music-and some of the early students of ethnic music were members of this group have also felt the need for using material from other cultures to corroborate their findings.

But musicologists in the twentieth century have increasingly become specialists in Western music. Nineteenth-century musicologists were probably more interested in music as a universal phenomenon than their twentieth-century pupils, who have found it useful and necessary to concentrate on very specific aspects of the Western musical tradition.

Ethnomusicology would appear to have less of a contribution to make to such specialized research, but it plays a role nevertheless. The relationship of Western music to that of its non-European neighborsBruno Nettl - Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology⁷ to the music of the Near East, to the tradition of Hebrew music, to the music of India, etc.- and even more, the ties of Western cultivated or urban music to its unwritten counterpart, folk music, are at various periods in history quite intimate. The art music of Europe has always interchanged material with the folk tradition of its geographic environment, and influences on Europe from other continents have perhaps been stronger than is generally recognized. For the evaluation of these influences, for description of the musical styles and practices in which they originated, the methods of ethnomusicology are a necessary tool.

To cite a widely used example, the study of the origins of European polyphony, which in the fine art tradition is assumed to date from the Middle Ages, involves non-Western musics which have polyphonic styles analogous or similar to those of medieval Europe. It involves also a knowledge of the musical styles which may have influenced Western Europe in the Middle Ages, and of the folk music (as it exists today, and as it may have existed then) which can be presumed to have been available for the exchange of musical ideas and materials. The examples which could be used to indicate the potential and past services of ethnomusicology to a study of the history of Western cultivated music are numerous; medieval polyphony is one of the outstanding ones. The data on non-Western and on folk styles must always be available for an intelligent interpretation of Western music history .

A similar case can be made for the need of musical information in anthropology. Music is one of the few universal cultural phenomena, for no people is known which does not have some kind of music. In spite of the great variety of musical styles the world over, there is enough homogeneity in musical behavior to make identification of music as such possible and simple. Thus, it is necessary for an anthropologist, if he is to be fully informed about a particular culture, to know also something about the musical behavior of the people. This is especially to be emphasized for those cultures-and there are many of them - in which music plays a role of great importance in cosmology, philosophy, and ceremonial life.

Music is sometimes used as corroborative evidence for particular theories in anthropology.The findings of E. M. von Hornbostel regarding the tuning of panpipes in Brazilhe thought the tuning to be identical with that used in parts of Oceania, presumably indicating prehistoric cultural contact between these areas-are a case in point. (This interpretation of Hornbostel's has, it should be noted, turned out to be controversial; but it is still a classic example of musical data in the service of ethnology).

Studies in acculturation, that is, the result of intimate contact between neighboring cultures, have been pursued through music (see Wachsmann 19611; Merriam 1955; and Chapter 8 of this book). Statistical measurement in cultural anthropology has been made with the use of musical phenomena, which lend themselves more easily to quantification than do some other aspects of culture, such as religion, social organization, etc. (See Merriam 1956)

And finally-perhaps this is another reason for the close association of music with statistics in cultural anthropology-there is the possibility of distinguishing between musical content and musical style, i.e., between specific compositions and the characteristics which they share with other pieces in their repertory (see Chapter 6). Ethnomusicological theory and research have been profoundly affected by this fact. It is possible for individual compositions, e.g., songs, to move from one culture to another and to change in the process, and it is also 1 Bibliographic references are given in the foml of internal citations which refer to the chapter biblographies. A publication is cited by giving in parentheses the author's last name, the date of his publication, and, where applicable, the page number(s) preceded by a colon. For example, (Sachs 1962:56) refers to the publication listed under Sachs' name, dated 1962, in the chapter bibliography, and to p. 56 of that publication. In order to reduce repetition of names, I have used phrases such as "Sachs (1962:56) says. .." to convey the same infomlation. The chapter bibliographies also indicate suggested supplementary reading; the suggested items are marked with asterisks. Where relevant, the pages within a publication which contain the suggested readings are especially cited.Bruno Nettl - Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology 8 possible for stylistic features – types of form, scale, rhythm – to move from one culture to another and be superimposed on songs already in existence. This kind of distinction, which can be made more easily in music and the other arts than elsewhere in culture, makes musical data of special use in the interpretation of cultural phenomena by the anthropologist.

Thus we see that ethnomusicology is most closely allied to historical musicology and to cultural anthropology. And while the various ethnomusicologists differ greatly in their definitions of the field, and in their emphases, probably none would deny the importance of the two related areas in his work. The role of ethnomusicology in two other fields, which are in a sense part of anthropology – folklore and linguistics – should also be mentioned.

Obviously, music in oral tradition (and this is the main raw material) is an important part of folklore, which involves those aspects of culture which live in the oral tradition, and especially those which involve artistic creativity. And since music is a form of communication related in some way to language, the field of ethnomusicology, which studies the world's music, can contribute to and draw on the field of linguistics, which studies the world's languages. Especially in studying the relationship of the words and music of songs are these two disciplines in close alliance.

The Scope of Ethnomusicology

For practical purposes, we may say that the ethnomusicologist deals mainly with three kinds of music. Most characteristic of the field and its history perhaps is the music of the nonliterate societies, those, that is, which have not developed a system of reading and writing of their own languages, and which, accordingly, have a relatively simple way of life.

Sachs (1962) objects to this view – as do some other scholars – because he believes that presence or absence of literacy does not constitute such a major distinction between culture types. The peoples in the non-literate category include the American Indians, the African Negroes, the Oceanians, the Australian aborigines, and many tribes throughout Asia. These cultures are frequently called "primitive," but the term is not really applicable because it implies that they are close to the early stages in man's history (which cannot be proved so far as culture is concerned) or exceedingly simple (which is not always correct, as some non-literate cultures have a very complex social organization, complicated rituals, art, and indeed, musical styles and customs involving music). Moreover, members of nonliterate societies who have mastered a world language such as English (and these individuals are increasing in number) understandably do not relish being referred to as "primitives" in their readings. Thus the term "primitive" has been gradually disappearing from the literature of anthropology and ethnomusicology. The term "pre-literate" has been used, but it has the disadvantage of implying an evolutionary, inevitable sequence leading to literacy. The term "tribal" is also found, but it is difficult to apply because it implies a particular kind of social and political structure which most, but not all, nonliterate cultures have. If a culture does not have a tribal organization, its music probably should still be included in the material under discussion, because it is, after all, distinguished by the lack of a written tradition. It is difficult to define "tribal" cultures. And thus the word "nonliterate," prosaic though it may seem compared with the shorter and more vivid-sounding terms as "tribal" and "primitive," seems the most descriptive one for the group of peoples with which ethnomusicology has been most closely associated.

A second category of music always included in the scope of ethnomusicology is that of the Asian and north African high cultures – China, Japan, Java, Bali, southwest Asia, India, Iran, and the Arabic – speaking countries. These are the cultures which have a cultivated music analogous in many ways to that of Western civilization, characterized by considerable complexity of style, by the development of a professional class of musicians, and of musical theory and notation. These cultures have for centuries had writings about music which have made possible a historical approach similar to that of the historian of Western music. Actually none of these nations makes use of a system of musical notation as complex and explicit as that of the West, and musical life, even in the urban areas, is largely in the realm of oral tradition where individuals learn music by hearing it and by being taught without the written notation. Thus it is often difficult to draw a sharp line between nonliterate musical cultures and oriental high cultures. Kunst calls the latter "traditional" (Kunst, 1959:1), and the ethnomusicological literature, without committing itself too deeply to a classification, simply refers to this vast area of cultures as "oriental."

A third category – and this one is not accepted by all ethnomusicologists – is folk music, which may be defined as the music in oral tradition found in those areas which are dominated by high cultures. Thus not only Western civilization but also the Asian nations such as Japan, China, etc., have folk music, but of course that of the West has played a much greater role in research. Folk music is generally distinguished from the music of nonliterate societies by having near it a body of cultivated music with which it exchanges material and by which it is profoundly influenced. It is distinguished from the cultivated or urban or fine art music by its dependence on oral tradition rather than on written notation, and, in general, by its existence outside institutions such as church, school, or government. And it has become accepted as part of ethnomusicology by many scholars because its styles, though related to those of Western art music, are yet sufficiently different to allow it to be classed among the strange, exotic manifestations of music which form the core of ethnomusicology.

Some Approaches to Ethnomusicology

Like most young disciplines, ethnomusicology has engaged in a good deal of selfcriticism and self-inspection. Since 1950, a number of articles have been written about the problems of defining the scope of ethnomusicology. While these give the impression of controversy, the authors do not argue so much about the outside limits of the field as about emphases within the field; with few exceptions, they agree on the scope of ethnomusicology. Most of them are prepared to include all cultures of the world, including Western civilization, but they recognize the greater importance to themselves of non-Western and folk music. Among the exceptions is Jaap Kunst (1959:1), who stresses the role of oral tradition as a distinguishing feature.

Curt Sachs, in the subtitle of his general work on ethnomusicology (Sachs 1959), specifies that Musik der Fremdkulturen (music of foreign cultures) is the material to be studied in what he still calls vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (comparative musicology – the earlier term for ethnomusicology). The German Marius Schneider (1957:1) specifies nonEuropean music, and emphasizes the importance, in defining the field, of comparative work.

Rhodes (1956) tends to support the same position. Kolinski (1957:1-2) , however, points out that it is not so much the geographic area as the general approach which distinguishes our field. He believes that ethnomusicology has developed a point of view which results from the study of many and diverse cultures, but which should be applied also to Western art music.

The notion that the subject matter should be limited geographically, Le., include only the non-Western world, has been the object of widespread objection and criticism. But in spite of the acceptance by many scholars of the desirability of including Western art music, it is taken for granted that only in studying a culture foreign to himself can a scholar master sufficient objectivity. By studying his own culture, he may be conditioned to too many prejudices and personal associations to be properly objective – so many ethnomusicologists believe.

Thus one may envision Western music being investigated in ethnomusicological fashion by African or Asian scholars, while Westerners could continue to specialize in non-Western cultures. Going even further in this direction, Merriam (1960) stresses the need for universal use of ethnomusicological methods. Indeed, Seeger ("Whither Ethnomusicology?", p. 101) believes that historians of Western art music have usurped the name "musicology", which should really be reserved for those now called ethnomusicologists; the mentioned historians would then be considered specialists within the broader field, coeval with, say, historians of Chinese music. While a case can be made for the justice of this proposal, there is not much point in urging its acceptance on the scholars involved. Finally, Chase (1958:7) defines ethnomusicology as the "musical study of contemporary man", including Western man; but he seems to omit from his definition the historical study of oriental cultivated music which is usually included, as well as the use of archeological evidence in nonliterate cultures.

In the matter of emphasis, most ethnomusicologists agree that the structure of music and its cultural context are equally to be studied, and that both must be known in order for an investigation to be really adequate. In the research done before 1930, analysis and description of the music itself outweighed the other approaches. Since 1950, on the other hand, the American ethnomusicologists coming from anthropology seem to have favored the study of musical culture over detailed work with the music itself. Merriam (1960:109-10) lists six main areas to which a student of one musical culture should give his attention, in addition to the music itself: 1) instruments; 2) words of songs; 3) native typology and classification of music; 4) role and status of musicians; 5) function of music in relation to other aspects of the culture; and 6) music as creative activity. Merriam also stresses the importance of field work, that is, of the need for the ethnomusicologist, in order to work effectively, to collect his raw material himself, and to observe it in its "live" state. Again, probably no one would deny the importance of field work. Before about 1940, however, it was taken for granted that some scholars would not or could not go into the field, and that they would do comparative work in the laboratory. It was also assumed that those who did field work would occasionally spend time at home working on music collected by othersgeneral anthropologists perhapswho could make recordings but could not analyze the music. These "armchair ethnomusicologists," according to Merriam (1960:113), are gradually decreasing in importance. Now, it may be argued that the basic field work can be replaced by the collecting and descriptive study on the part of native scholars in underdeveloped countries, for instance that the American field worker in the Congo can be replaced by the Congolese working in his own backwoods. Also, it may be said that an ethnomusicologist devoting himself entirely to afield study of one culture can hardly engage in comparative work. And if he is replaced by the native field worker, what will his function be? It may be argued that, in addition to field work, the armchair approach, broad and comparative, is a very essential contribution of ethnomusicology. According to Seeger ("Whither Ethnomusicology?", p. 104), "who will digest the results? It is the Hornbostels who will do so with great and lofty objectivity, and together the two techniques (field and comparative) will give us the music of mankind." On the other hand, few would seriously object to Merriam's statement that the primary understanding of music depends on an understanding of the people's culture (Merriam 1960:113). Since 1953, a group of American ethnomusicologists has tried to achieve the kind of understanding envisioned by Merriam by immersing itself into foreign cultures as active musicians. The basic assumption of this group, whose leader is Mantle Hood, equates the musical style of a culture to some extent with a language, so that by long contact with a given musical culture, an ethnomusicologist can become the equivalent of a native musician.

Just as it takes a great deal of learning and practice to learn a second language beyond one's native tongue, and thus to become bilingual, it requires time and frequent contact with another musical culture to become bi-musical (Hood 1960). Some ethnomusicologists have become as proficient as Siamese, Indian, and Japanese musicians, having studied with native masters. A member of such a group becomes a specialist on only one or two foreign musical cultures. This approach has been a great success, but it seems to exclude the possibility of the broad comparative approach, since a Westerner can no more become proficient in many musical cultures than he can learn to speak many languages perfectly. The concept of bi-musicality has also been used by ethnomusicologists in nonWestern nations whose aim is not only the objective study of their music but the shaping of a musical culture in which Western and native elements are combined. This approach could perhaps be called "applied ethnomusicology", in a fashion analogous to "applied anthropology," whose function is to help non-Western groups through the process of acculturation with Western civilization. A much more comprehensive statement of Hood's position was published in 1963 (Hood 1963). Here Hood also surveys the history of ethnomusicology in America.

We see, then, that the field of ethnomusicology has a core of subject matter – the music of nonliterate cultures, the music of advanced oriental societies, and the folk music of Western and oriental civilizations – which is generally accepted as its field of competence, and that disagreements exist only in defining the outer limits of the field and in determining emphasis and approach. We can summarize the consensus in stating that ethnomusicology is, in fact as well as theory, the field which pursues knowledge of the world's music, with emphasis on that music outside the researcher's own culture, from a descriptive and comparative viewpoint. Field work and laboratory analysis, structure of music and cultural background, broad comparison and the narrower specialization associated with developing bimusicality, synchronic and diachronic study – all are relevant and important. Needless to say, in all approaches, objectivity, avoidance of value judgments based on the investigator's own cultural background, and the acceptance of music as apart of culture are essential.

Finally, we may ask again whether ethnomusicologists should concern themselves with the music of the Western high culture; and if they did this, how they would be distinguished from the "ordinary" historians of Western music. My personal answer to the first question is a not-tooemphatic "yes." The second question will be answered, in part, in this book. In summary, this answer is that historians of Western music have concentrated on a few aspects of musical culture, and that they have sometimes taken things for granted which should not have been taken for granted. An ethnomusicological approach to Western music would take into account the role of music in culture, the problems of performance practice, those of descriptive versus prescriptive notation, the procedures and methods of describing music (which have barely been touched in Western music). The difficulties of studying foreign musical cultures have forced the musicologists to develop methods which try to assure obectivty and criticism of evidence. The historian of Western music, being a member of the culture which he is studying, has not always had to be so concerned with objectivity, and the approach of the critic rather than the scholar is still felt in many of his publications. The ethnomusicologist's main potential contribution to the study of Western music is, then, the techniques which he has developed in the study of other musical cultures.

Trends in the History of Ethnomusicology

A definitive history can hardly be written for a field, such as ethnomusicology which is so new that the majority of its exponents are still living and active. Several brief surveys of the history of ethnomusicology have appeared; those by Sachs (1962:5-32), Kunst (1959), and Nettl (1956:26-44) may be mentioned here. This history is actually the subject of our book and appears in its various aspects in each chapter. Our task here is to summarize the ideological trends in the history of ethnomusicology , something which is not easy to do because so many of the scholars are of the present rather than the past: their total contributions as well as their predominant points of view can hardly be evaluated since their views may change and their important contributions may be superseded by still more significant ones. Many trends can be felt in different countries at various times, and the emergence of individual scholars has occasionally wrought sudden changes in these trends because the field is so sparsely populated. Nevertheless, certain tendencies have been manifested, and the alternating influence of various disciplines has caused an alternation of emphasis and interest which is worth noting.

As a field concerned with the music of non-Western cultures, ethnomusicology is an old area of interest; but as a field with modern methods and equipment and with a name, it is relatively new. In some ways it goes back to the composers of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance who used folk music and even some Asian material, which would have been considered very exotic, as elements in some of their compositions. The Renaissance humanists and the eighteenth-century rationalists were surely the spiritual predecessors of the modern interest in all aspects of man's behavior, and in the ways of men outside one's own culture. To the history of ethnomusicology belongs Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose famous encyclopedia of music, first published in 1767, contains samples of folk, Chinese, and American Indian music. Descriptions of oriental music were written by missionaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And an interest in European folk music has been conspicuous in the world of scholarship in early nineteenth-century Europe, particularly England and Germany.

Perhaps we can consider the descriptions of Chinese music by French missionaries (du Halde, Amiot) and the collecting of German folk song by philosophers and philologists (such as Herder and the brothers Grimm) as part of the same cultural tradition. Different as were the backgrounds of these two groups of students, both were evidently motivated by a regard for the value of musical material foreign to themselves. It is curious to find missionaries, whose aim was to present Western culture and religion to the Orient, doing also the opposite, bringing oriental music to the West. But it was to be expected that the poets of Romanticism would take an interest in the songs of the rural population. The collections of individuals such as Herder (see Pulikowski 1933) and the theoretical treatises on folklore by what Dorson (1955) calls the first group of English folklorists were eventually to have considerable impact on the development of ethnomusicology. But there is actually not much connection between, on the one hand, the nineteenth-century collectors of folk song, the missionaries such as Amiot, and the historians of Western music who also delved into the Orient, such as Kiesewetter, and on the other hand, the founders of the discipline of ethnomusicology.

Whereas ethnomusicology is usually, by implication, considered much younger than historical musicology, the two areas, in the modern senses of their names, originated in the same decade. Musicology is usually considered to have started in 1885 with the publication of the Vierteljahrschrift fur Musikwissenschaft, whose founders were Philipp Spitta, Friedrich Chrysander, and Guido Adler. These scholars distinguished between music history and the presumably more scholarly and in some ways scientific approach of musicology, which was to embrace not only Western music history but also the various aspects of "systematic musicology" – music theory, acoustics, psychology of music, and the synchronic study of the music of non-Western cultures. The second volume of the Vierteljahrschrift fur Musikwissenschaft did indeed contain a milestone in ethnomusicology: Carl Stumpf's study of Bella Coola Indian songs (Stumpf 1800) , which is considered by some as the first really ethnomusicological publication since it is a study of the musical style of a single tribe with emphasis on the structure of scale and melody (see also Chapter 2).

Jaap Kunst (1959:2-3) does not consider Stumpf as the first bona fide ethnomusicologist, but prefers to place A. J. Ellis in this honored spot. Ellis's major work (Ellis 1885) is close in time to Stumpf's and again shows the proximity in time of origin between historical musicology and ethnomusicology.

Kunst considers Ellis important because of his contributions to methodology - the socalled cents system of measuring intervals was devised by him – rather than because of his investigation of any individual musical style or culture. Whichever of these scholars is considered the real founder of our field, its beginnings belong properly in the 1880's, the time in which historical musicology also began.

Ethnomusicology was not the outgrowth of a single field; rather, representatives of several disciplines converged, roughly at the same time, but probably not by coincidence, on the music of the non-Western cultures. Carl Stumpf can perhaps be considered a representative of the field of psychology, which was one of the subjects on which he published widely, and both he and the outstanding Erich M. von Hornbostel were employed in the "psychological institute" of the University of Berlin. A. I. Ellis was a philologist and mathematician. Walter Fewkes was an anthropologist; while Franz Boas, the anthropologist who had such a great impact on American ethnomusicologists, brought to his field the methods of his first areas of study, geography and physics. The historians of Western music who were prominent at the time of the first ethnomusicological publications – Adler, Spitta, Chrysander – had an interest in and a respect for this new branch of their discipline, but their own contributions to it and their influence on it were relatively minor. In later times, and even during the 1940's and 1950's, ethnomusicologists seem to have been recruited less from the ranks of music historians than from those of folklorists and anthropologists, and when the field of music did contribute a scholar to the field, it was perhaps more likely to be a practicing musician or composer than a historian.

The large number of disciplines which have contributed personnel has made ethnomusicology a field with little centralized methodology. We cannot say that any single tradition led to our methods. A field which has the broad goal of understanding all of the world's music in its cultural context has of necessity had to draw on the experience of many fields of study.

The diversity of our origins has been more of an asset than aliability, even though it has at times obstructed clear communication. But in the early days of ethnomusicology, the importance of psychologically and mathematically oriented scholars had far-reaching consequences. Characteristically, the recognition by Ellis, that intervals must be measured objectively, and his invention of the cents system according to which each halftone is divided into 100 equal parts (the cents) gave impetus to the objective description of scales. The importance of the invention of sound recording to the development of ethnomusicology cannot be overestimated. Right from the time of the earliest recordings, students of non-Westem music began using this marvelous method of preserving the sound of a performance of music, as a way of collecting their raw material and as an aid to its analysis. It is generally believed that the first recordings of non-Western music were made by Walter Fewkes, who made Edison cylinders of Zuni and Passamaquoddy Indian songs in 1889.

The phonographic recording of ethnic music was taken up by other American scholars, such as Frances Densmore, and shortly after Fewkes' beginning, the German pioneer Carl Stumpf also published a study of Indian music (Stumpf 1892) based on recorded material.

The need for using recordings in the study of non-Westem music was immediately obvious to the student. He was, after all, confronted by a kind of sound which may have seemed chaotic, which made no musical sense to his Western-oriented ear, and he needed repeated hearings in order to enable him to reduce this mass of strangeness to something which his mind could perceive as a system. In the area of folk music, the need for studies based on recordings was not generally accepted quite as early. Here the student thought himself to be faced by a kind of music with whose style he was already familiar through his acquaintance with Western cultivated music, and because folk songs had already been written down and published in collections for decades. It was not until the highly prestigious Bela Bartok (whose notations, based on recordings, differ so greatly from those presented in commercial folk song collections) showed that ethnomusicological methods of notating music produced a page of music which looked quite different from the pages of older folk song collections, and began to publish his scientific studies of Hungarian and other Eastern European folk music, that European folk song began routinely to partake of the processes of field recording and transcription. After the practice of recording became established at the turn of the nineteenth century , many individuals not primarily or particularly interested in music began to make recordings of the music of cultures near which they happened to be. It became evident that the processes of colonization and Westernization of all peoples was about to work changes in the musical cultures of the world, and that many musical styles would soon disappear. This applied also to Europe and North America, whose rapid urbanization and industrialization threatened to cause the traditional folk music styles to disappear.

Anthropologists and folklorists therefore took up the cause of music recording, and since they required no special knowledge of music in order to make these recordings, great numbers of cylinders, and later, of disks, were produced and given to the ethnomusicologists, who worked at home in the laboratory, for transcription and analysis. Indeed, the bulk of the material collected was too great for the small sprinkling of interested ethnomusicologists to handle, so that the establishment of organized archives became essential.

The idea of having archives for storing, processing, classifying, and cataloging ethnomusicological recordings has become basic in the field and has led to the development of a special area of knowledge and skill within ethnomusicology. Archives are, in a sense, equivalent to libraries in other disciplines insofar as their importance in research is concerned.

The most famous of the European archives is the Phonogramm Archiv in Berlin, founded in 1900 by Carl Stumpf and Otto Abraham mainly for storing cylinders brought by German ethnologists. It functioned for several decades as the model for archives established elsewhere, especially in the United States, where a former assistant in the Berlin archive, George Herzog, was later to build at Columbia University a similar collection which moved, in 1948, to Indiana University. Since World War II, the leading role among archives has been taken over by Herzog's institution, called the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music (and which in 1954 came under the direction of George List), and by the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. For histories of the various European archives, see issues of the Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, also the works of Kunst (1959), Herzog (1936), and Hornbostel (1933). The history of archives is a fascinating one to which an entire volume should be devoted: we can mention only the most important individual institutions.

Most of the archives have recordings as their primary interest; background information of all sorts (see Chapter 3) is included, but notations are not usually part of the collections, although the Indiana University archive as well as the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv have issued lists of publications based on their recorded holdings. Some of the European folk song archives, however, have consisted largely of transcriptions, and only lately have begun adding recordings to their holdings.

Possibly the most prominent of these archives is the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv in Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Here are stored collected versions of the words and music of German folk songs in manuscript as well as on recordings. The disadvantages of manuscript collections compared to recorded ones, if not self-evident, are discussed in Chapter 4. But an archive such as that in Freiburg has the advantage of making possible a much more thorough indexing and cataloging of its material than does a collection consisting only of recordings.

The Freiburg archive has a number of catalogues and indexes, making it possible to identify songs according to type, place collected, first phrase of the tunes, related tunes in European folk music outside Germany, inclusion in printed sources, etc. This type of cataloguing has not had a great impact on the archives which concentrate on non-Western music, but it should become, increasingly, an aspect of all ethnomusicological archiving. In summary, we should stress that the development of archives has been tremendously important. In the 1960's, national archives in many nations, regional ones in large countries such as the United States, and more modest institutional ones around; and one of the future tasks of ethnomusicology will be to centralize the information regarding the holdings of all of these collections.

The work of many ethnomusicologists has been oriented toward the individual piece of music, rather than-as some would wish – toward the musical behavior of cultures. And this fact has as its background the development of archives and their emphasis on identifying and creating approaches to the specific work of music. The fact that archives have, to a degree, neglected the cultural context of music is perhaps a factor in the relative neglect, until very recently, of this important phase of ethnomusicology.

Ethnomusicology in the United States

In the United States, ethnomusicology since 1900 has occupied a position of relatively greater prominence than it has in Europe. We have mentioned the early recording activities of Walter Fewkes, who was later to become the director of the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington (an institution which was, throughout this century, to sponsor a great deal of research on Indian music including the tremendous recording activity of Frances Densmore) American students of non-Western culture soon began to realize that music is an aspect of human behavior worth including in any picture of culture; but their European counterparts, with few exceptions, have shown less interest in music beyond making field recordings – which is in itself, of course, a valuable contribution. In the United States, some of the anthropologists became active in the study of these recordings, in transcription, analysis, and so forth. And anthropological institutions were the ones which supported scholars working in non- Western music. This is probably due to the attitude of Franz Boas, the German immigrant who is generally considered the leader of the distinctively American approach to anthropology which emphasizes field work, the description of whole cultures, and an interest in psychology. Boas himself made field recordings on the northwest coast of the United States and Canada, and did a certain amount of transcribing. And he trained a number of investigators who were to become scholars of great prominence (among them George Herzog), and who were to emphasize the role of the arts in their work. This tradition of anthropological background in American ethnomusicology (in contrast to the prevailingly musicological background in Europe) continued into the 1950's.

Of course the statement of this tradition should not be taken too literally, for it indicates only a tendency; exceptions abound, and many individual scholars cannot be classified as being on either side of this not-too-distinct fence. In his relationship to other scholars, the ethnomusicologist (according to Sachs 1962:15) "sits on the fence between musicology and ethnology."

But this is in a way only due to the coincidences which caused the field to be populated by individuals who began in one of the two main disciplines and then found the other attractive and necessary.

The American ethnomusicologists who approached their field as anthropologists did, indeed, frequently get into anthropology from the field of music. Some were practicing musicians (especially jazz musicians) who wished to delve into the folk and non-Westem roots of their art. Others were students of Western music history who discovered the music of other cultures more or less by academic coincidences such as being required to take a cognate course in "comparative musicology." Some were students of anthropology who, hearing examples of African music, were motivated by the piano lessons taken in their youth to explore the exotic music further. Characteristically, it was the musician who in his student days was stimulated by anthropology, but who then returned to approach the field of ethnomusicology as an anthropologist. It has been rare for a student of culture to begin, as a graduate student, to show an interest in music, and to start from scratch to develop the knowledge of music needed for detailed ethnomusicological work.

Perhaps the musical skill required for transcription and analysis must be acquired early in life, or at least cannot be gleaned from books but requires hours of laboratory training. At any rate, until recently, the American anthropologist who did not have a musical background of sorts was sometimes discouraged from making studies of music beyond simply collecting recordings in the field. Thus, while they have recognized the importance of music in culture and have encouraged the ethnomusicologists in their ranks, American anthropologists have not been very active in describing musical behavior themselves. But again, exceptions must be noted, and this is only a tendency. Since the 1940's, there have been efforts, especially on the part of Melville I. Herskovits, Alan P. Merriam, Richard A. Waterman, and others, to encourage anthropologists without a music background to study directly at least certain aspects of musical behavior which do not involve the technical analysis of music (see Merriam 1960).

Similar trends can be noted in European institutions in the 1950's. But in most cases, European scholars have been completely trained musicologists who later moved into ethnomusicology and digested the anthropological information which they needed when they were already mature scholars. Being historians of music, they frequently turned to the art music of the Asian nations, although they showed an interest also in the nonliterate cultures.

Up to the 1950's, the American ethnomusicologists were mainly students of what they themselves called "primitive and folk music."

Since the early 1950's three important trends in American ethnomusicology have changed its image. Perhaps the most evident of these is the concept of bi-musicality as a way of scholarly presentation of the music of other cultures, and of active performance and even composition in the idiom of another culture as a way of learning the essentials of its musical style and behavior. This concept, fostered primarily by Mantle Hood at the University of California at Los Angeles, has had a great impact on the musicians in the United States and has taken the field of ethnomusicology to a degree out of the hands of anthropology departments in the universities and placed it in the music departments, many 0£ which had previously been quite neglectful of it. Students of this new school of thought go into the field not so much as ethnological investigators but as pupils, and their desire is among other things to find competent native teachers who would teach them, as they would teach native pupils, the musical arts of their countries. Of course this approach is simplest in those cultures which have a way of talking about music, a system of music theory, and a tradition of music instruction. Thus it has been Followed most frequently in the Asian high cultures.

Pupils 0£ Mantle Hood have begun teaching ethnomusicology at a number of American colleges, the result being that oriental music has begun to play a much greater role in ethnomusicology as it is practiced in this country. The more traditional, anthropological approach continues side-by-side with this new one, but even anthropologists, such as David P. McAllester, have been profoundly influenced by the idea that active performance, as well as passive observation, is of great use in studying a musical culture outside one's own background. We should add that while the performance or bimusicality approach is obviously a great help, a student who has simply become accepted as a native Indian or Japanese musician has not yet, by virtue of this fact, become an ethnomusicologist, for at that point he has not yet made a contribution to our knowledge of world music: he has simply helped to prepare himself for making such a contribution in the future.

A second trend of the 1950's was the increasing concern of the ethnomusicologist with the contemporary music of other cultures. The tendency to look for "pure" or "authentic" material which had never undergone any influence from Western music has gradually given way to an attitude according to which musical material available in a culture is the object to be studied, and its presumed age or the degree to which it has been influenced by other musical cultures, while interesting, is not a criterion for inclusion in ethnomusicological study.

An interest in the processes whereby the musical influence of the West is being brought to bear on non-Western musics, and, ultimately, in the ethnomusicological study of Western high culture, is becoming increasingly evident. Here ethnomusicology has followed the trend in American anthropology , according to whose views the anthropological methods must be used to study not only the cultures outside the investigator's background, but also his own culture. Since World War II, anthropologists in the United States have devoted increasing energy to studies of the American culture (see for example a special issue of American Anthropologist, vol. 57, no.6, 1955) , and investigators native to other cultures have worked in their own backgrounds.

The emergence of musical scholars in those countries inhabited by some of the nonliterate societies has made it possible to accept the idea that the student of ethnomusicology can work in his own culture. Just as anthropologists have, in following this kind of an interest, collided with sociologists, historians, psychologists, etc., the ethnomusicologists may be stepping on the toes of their brother historians of contemporary Western music, of psychologists of music, etc. But many ethnomusicologists in the United States feel strongly that the methods and approaches which they learned in dealing with music outside their own culture can usefully be applied to Western art music, and that these methods can show things which the methods of musicologists at large cannot. Whether they are right remains to be seen; but especially in the area of comparison and in studies involving music as a universal concept can their point of view be useful. Just as some of the early ethnomusicologists came to the study of foreign cultures because of their desire to find out about man's musical behavior at large, which could  not be determined on the basis of their own culture alone, the modern ethnomusicologist, who still wants to study man's musical culture, feels that he must include also the most complex culture of all along with the non-Western and folk cultures traditionally part of his discipline.

A third trend is the investigation of musical culture without the analysis and description of musical style, but through field work in which the role of music and of the individual's musical activity is researched. The impact of anthropology on this attitude has been mentioned above. We should indicate also another factor, the sudden growth of the recording industry, which has made available vast numbers of commercial records of non-Western and folk music, much of it of excellent research quality.

One result of this sudden mushrooming of available sound has been a feeling of frustration on the part of the ethnomusicologist who must spend hours making a notation of one song, and a feeling that it is possible to analyze a considerable portion of musical behavior without the use of notation. Thus the emergence of mass recordings has tended to discourage the kind of detailed study of individual pieces which was formerly characteristic, and to reinforce the tendency, already present in anthropology, to describe musical behavior rather than musical style. It is to be hoped that the very laudable stress on the cultural context of music will not cause a substantial decrease in the technical study of the music itself.

The three tendencies mentioned here as being important during the 1950's and early 1960's are most evident in North America. The European ethnomusicologists have continued, largely, to work in solid traditions developed in the 1920's; and their contributions have been great. An interest in the typology of music, in the relationship of folk to art music, and in the geographic distribution of musical style have been among the noticeable emphases in European ethnomusicology since World War II. But since 1955, the amount of contact and the interdependence of European and American scholars so far as theory and method are concerned have steadily grown.

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